Theater: Bending time and gender in 'Orlando'

Thursday

Mar 1, 2018 at 3:50 PM

Jody Feinberg The Patriot Ledger

In most plays, the show could not continue if an actor left mid-play because of illness, and for a moment last Sunday, it was possible that the audience would be left hanging 10 minutes before the ending of "Orlando.” In this comic romp about gender identity, the four remaining ensemble actors took on the role of the absent fifth and, after a five-minute break, the Lyric Stage Company production continued seamlessly.

That's a tribute to the skill of the actors, as well as to the decision by director Norah Long that each ensemble actor rehearse all the lines of the more than two dozen characters played by the cast, giving them shifting identities until just a week before the play opened.

In this fast-moving, ambitious and farcical fairy tale, Orlando - played impressively by Caroline Lawton - experiences a radical transformation from a naive, melancholic wealthy young man in 16th century Elizabethan England to a noble woman in the 18th century in Constantinople. As both man and woman, Orlando has a series of amorous relations, yet he is expected to act entirely different as a woman.

“When I was a man, I insisted that women be chaste, obedient and scented, but now I will have to pay in my own for this desire, for women are not judging from my short experience of the sex, obstinate, chaste and scented by nature,” she reflects as she amusingly parodies how she now is expected to move in a hooped gown and speak in a higher, gentler voice.

Lawton is entertaining and often funny, showing a gift for physical comedy and imagination. The ensemble – who is both narrator and Orlando’s love interests as Queen Elizabeth, a Russian princess, an archduke/archduchess, a sea captain and other characters – energetically pulls the story through five centuries and numerous liaisons. On a raised white platform, they move amidst thin columns and arches and underneath a chandelier, wrapped in white cloth, inspired by the concept that a person has an inner core and an outside wrapping.

The exploration of gender identity and fluidity, which was radical in 1928 when Virginia Woolf wrote her novel of the same name, is particularly relevant today. Yet, the play by award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl at times feels rushed and more declarative than dramatic: the 35-minute first act is entirely about Orlando as a man, while the complex issues Orlando faces when his gender changes is handled in just a 40-minute second act.

Lawton convincingly conveys Orlando’s frustration and even bewilderment, since she continues to feel male despite how others view her and she is confronted with centuries of change. Overtime, Orlando adapts to become more typically female and has numerous suitors, but only truly falls in love when she meets a man who seems as though he once was a woman. They marry, but Orlando then faces another dilemma – how can she be both wife and the poet she has wanted to be since she was a young man. That desire for the freedom to write is at the core of Woolf's essay "A Room of One's Own."

“If one still wished more than anything in the world to write poetry, was it marriage?” asks Orlando.

Woolf said she wrote “Orlando” for her lover and friend, Vita Sackville-West, who had same-sex relationships, cross-dressed, and challenged society's rules. In the lobby, audiences can read excerpts from a letter Woolf sent to Sackville-West, “But listen; suppose Orlando turns out to be Vita; and it’s all about you and the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind…” For her part, Sackville-West was thrilled, as she wrote to Woolf, “It seems the loveliest, wisest, richest book that I have ever read…”

When Orlando returns home to 20th century London, she says “I am sick to death of this particular self and visits Queen Elizabeth (who had taken her as a young lover four centuries earlier). The Queen asks, `What’s wrong Orlando? You don’t seem like yourself.'”

“I’m not sure there is such a thing Your Highness … I would like … to feel at this present moment that I am only one thing.”

“Don’t be a bore Orlando,” Your Highness tells her.

As audiences ponder the complexity of Orlando’s identity, one thing is clear – they won’t be bored.